Posts Tagged ‘record player’

We’ve had this old guy for a couple of years now. We’ve wanted a vinyl collection and a cool old turntable for years – in fact, the Christmas we were engaged I bought Eric three records in anticipation of this future reality. We did some research and were put off by the idea of buying a new record player, most of which covert records into Mp3’s (SO not the point). Right around this time we discovered that Eric’s grandpa had an old turntable in his garage, and he told us we just needed an amplifier for it. Figuring it was free and couldn’t be that difficult to set up, we brought it home with us. But we were intimidated by its weird plugs and the grounding wire that I believed to be something else entirely more complicated that might require stripping and twisting and capping wires and potential electrocution, and we realized we would need some sort of additional piece of equipment to make it work properly. So there on our side table the turntable sat, posing as something functional and hip and fulfilling, when in actuality it gathered lots of dust and took up space. (You can even see it here, most clearly in the last picture.)

UNTIL.

Until my dear parents got us an Amazon giftcard for our anniversary, and we began to actually investigate what would be required to hook everything up. To our surprise and annoyance — after all, this took us 3 years to figure out — all we needed to buy was a pre-amp (of which we chose a cheap one – and please don’t ask me what exactly this is), and we were even left with enough money to buy ourselves two records: the new Fleet Foxes, to be released this month, and last year’s epic Beach House album. AND in talking to Lauren I discovered that she and Nick owned an extra copy of the newest Strokes album, as yet unheard by the King fam, and offered to send it to us.

We’re trying to be very selective about our vinyl collection – living in Portland, it’d be way too easy to go drop not that much money to accumulate a ton of used vinyl, but in our opinion by that methodology our collection wouldn’t really be that special. As it stands, other than the oddball Steely Dan (which I love and Eric is okay with), all our records are new and specially selected over and above countless other excellent albums.

Our tentative plan is to try to buy one record that we really want about once a month and to be intentional with our purchases and with setting aside time to really listen to each album as whole.